I think there is a synthesis happening in the subconscious, a drawing on our experience, both personal and shared with us. The synthesis emerges as intuition. Trusting that intuition allows an expansion of the data available to us that further improves our ability to synthesize and increases the accuracy of our intuition.

This is also how machine based learning works for AI, but I sincerely doubt that the intuition developed by AI will improve on human intuition, but it has the advantage of being able to process more data.